


troth

by waldorph



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 14:49:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8989063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waldorph/pseuds/waldorph
Summary: The Potters had not been pleased when their darling, precious, sweet little boy decided at the tender age of three that he would be marrying Draco Malfoy.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [screamlet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/gifts).



> for the prompt: an AU where draco was the orphaned chosen one and harry the bitchfaced pureblood. NATURE VS NURTURE, MOTHERFUCKERS.

There were monsters in her house, a snake in the sky, and Death waiting patiently to collect.

Lucius looked at her, his face drawn and grim as she stepped into the room, holding Draco in her arm. 

“You protected him,” he said, not quite a question, but with Lucius it never was. He didn’t know the language of hope, but that had always been alright, because she had understood him, learned to parse and translate. 

“Yes,” she said, and felt the faint echo of Andromeda’s heart in her own chest, magic old and almost-forgotten binding them. She pressed her lips to Draco’s forehead, and he blinked and grabbed for her hair, tugging. Lucius hesitated, and Narcissa looked at him. “We won’t see him grow up,” she said evenly. Downstairs, Bellatrix was laughing and demanding to know where she was, as though they were children again, and Narcissa, errant youngest child, had hidden too well. 

Lucius took Draco from her, and she turned to give him privacy, felt the silver-metallic rush of Lucius’s magic as he whispered the benedictions of his family. 

The Dark Lord’s mark hung over their home, and he had come to take their child. He had come for their child as though he, the bastard half-blood son of a love potion, could have anything of theirs not freely given. 

Narcissa cut her palm and placed it on Draco’s face. He startled, and then began wailing, and then he was gone, a vast, sucking emptiness in the room where he had been, like the house itself was reeling from his absence. 

Lucius extended his hand to her, and she took it. They had made a mistake, somewhere along the line. They had done everything expected of them: perfect grades, advantageous marriage, led society, had a child. But Voldemort hadn’t been a mere romp of silliness, and he hadn’t been one of those old societies one joined to try to conjure the Old Ways, who flattered the Sacred 28. He was a virus taking them all down from within, and Narcissa knew to her bones that until he turned his eyes onto their son, she and Lucius might not have seen it until it was too late. 

He had looked, though. He had been too attentive during her pregnancy, curious about her family’s history, Lucius’s, how pure their child’s blood would be. Voldemort was power-hungry, and interested in Old Magic, and Draco was the culmination of years of magical lineages aligning. There was no blood purer, no blood more tied to this land, and ordinarily that meant nothing. Once upon a time it might have meant everything, but now-- 

Narcissa flicked her wand, and Bellatrix’s shocked rictus that Narcissa  _ could _ kill her was almost comical, and she almost laughed until Lucius gasped, “Enemy of my house” and dropped from her grip. As Malfoy Manor began to awake to defend its master, Voldemort turned to her with eyes terrible and empty and hungry. “I don’t want to hurt you, my dear Narcissa,” he said, and she nearly laughed at him. He didn’t want to hurt her, and yet there was Lucius on the floor, his eyes unseeing, his body unmoving. Her son was gone, and beyond her reach, and her heart beat  _ Draco, Draco, Draco _ as she said, 

“You’re only an upstart Mudblood with delusions of grandeur, Tom. What do you think you could possibly offer me?”

*

Miles away, Andromeda Tonks gently used a flannel to wash her nephew’s face. He was screaming, and Andromeda tried to offer comfort, shushing gently even though her voice cracked each time she tried to do more than that. The strange twinned heartbeat that she had lived with for nearly a month was gone, and she felt strangely alone again, even more than she had felt when she’d been disowned. 

Ted leaned in the doorway, and said, “So he did go after them? She wasn’t lying.”

Andromeda looked own at Narcissa’s son, whom she’d never before met. He was so small, even for a six-month-old, and she couldn’t tell if there was anything of Narcissa in him. But she remembered her sister’s laughter as a child, and her bewildered teenaged hurt that had turned into furious betrayal when Andromeda had left her family name for a Half-Blooded husband. 

“Cissy wouldn't have lied about that,” she said. Ted nodded, and went to tell the Order. Andromeda shifted Draco in her arms, swaying back and forth and she almost shrieked when Nymphadora stepped out of the shadows, her normal color returning. 

“What happened?” she asked, her bare feet soft on the kitchen floor. She peered at the screaming baby, legs stretching until she was tall enough to really look, and scrunched up her face. “Why is she doing that?”

“He,” Andromeda corrected, wondering if he was hungry. She wondered if any of the Elves had escaped the house. Ted wouldn’t like it, but at least she’d know--well. There were potions to induce lactation, but Narcissa had never liked to share, and it felt like--like a betrayal. Andromeda wasn’t his mother. Beyond that, she didn’t want to confuse the magic keeping him secret and safe. 

“His name is Draco,” she said to Nymphadora, sending a note to Lily Potter, who was her best bet for formula. “He’s your cousin, and he’s going to live with us.” 

Nymphadora considered him. “Where are his parents?” she asked. 

“They died,” Andromeda said, and Nymphadora’s eyes went wide and devastated. 

“He’s all by himself? All alone?” she asked in a hushed voice, stretching up to look at him again. 

“Yes,” Andromeda said. “But we’ll take care of him, won’t we?”

When the Order arrived on her doorstep, and she thought more than anything Dumbledore just looked confused. Lily went to heat up formula. 

“James and Remus are with Harry,” she said. “Sirius is--”

“She killed Bella,” Sirius said. 

“Tactless,” Lily finished with a sigh. 

Andromeda stared at him, letting him take Draco from her numb-feeling arms. He rocked him, watching her closely. “Whatever decisions Cissy made,” he said, “She wasn’t--The whole house rose up, it’s completely shut down, and nobody’s seen or heard from You-Know-Who in the last couple of hours.”

“To be safe, we want to move you to a safe--” Dumbledore began, and Andromeda turned to Sirus, who nodded instantly. 

“Number 12,” he agreed with her unspoken insistence. It had been in the family for generations, and the land it sat on had been theirs even in the days before their families had gone underhill, so long ago. There was power in blood, and magic in it too, and in thousands of years of history.

It took three hours to move into Number 12, her whole life, the life she built outside of her family, bundled up and shoved awkwardly into its arms. 

“It’s bizarre, though,” Sirius said, once everyone was moved in and Ted was arguing in the kitchen with Kreacher (who was still, inexplicably,  _ living _ ) about how to make a cuppa. Sirius hadn’t surrendered Draco yet, and Andromeda wondered if it was the blood magic that drew him in or just that he was feeling that deep grief she was, for the girls her sisters had once been--for the boy Regulus had been. She felt a little guilty she wasn’t snatching Draco back from him. “We’re the last ones. It killed them all.” 

It was hard not to think that. The Ancient and Noble House of Black had all followed their purity into a spiral that had killed them, and she and Sirius had run from it and were standing the unwilling victors; to them had come the spoils, whether they’d wanted them or not. Andromeda had loved them all, even though she had left them behind, and she was most furious about Cissy, because it felt like she could have gotten at least that sister back. But perhaps not. Narcissa was--had been--proud, and Andromeda had turned her back on her. They might never have reconciled, but now she would never have the opportunity to know, and it made her  _ furious _ . 

“The house will protect us, at least,” she said. “Even if he’s gone, there may be people who want to hunt Draco down.” 

Sirius looked down at Draco then, and said, “What did he want? Why go after the baby?”

“Ritual sacrifice, Narcissa seemed to think, or possibly a pureblooded host. He’s seeking immortality.” 

Draco began playing with the tangle of necklaces Sirius insisted on wearing, and Sirius held him closer. 

*

In the days that followed, it became clear that Voldemort was gone. People started cautiously celebrating, and by the following Monday, one week after Andromeda had become the only member of her family left standing, all of Wizarding Britain was in a fury of relieved exultation, celebrating an unexpected last-minute reprieve. Sirius had taken Draco to the Potters’, to meet Harry. At some point she was going to have to sit him down and talk to him about Draco, but that would mean she would have to think about Draco in more than just the immediate. It ached to think about him as Cissy’s son and she would have to consider how to raise him. 

She left Ted and Nymphadora to go visit his brother and join the celebrations, opting to make the trip to Wiltshire alone. Ted had offered to come, but there had been no sense in that. Ted had never really understood her family, and she had never wanted him to. She had worked so hard to erase all of those gulfs between them, but sometimes they were both so aware of the ways she’d been raised, and how different it was to his own childhood; how different her understanding of the world was from his. 

She didn’t know why it was so important to her that she come here, to Malfoy Manor. It was dark and forbidding, like the beast’s castle in Beauty and the Beast, all the light and gold stripped from it. The trees and briars had stretched and grown, tangled wildly around the perimeter. It looked wild, and overgrown, and long-abandoned and she wanted to scream at it. They hadn’t even been able to get back in to recover the bodies--the gates had soldered themselves together, unyielding. 

Andromeda had only been to Malfoy Manor once, for a Yule Gala when she’d been a child. She remembered it bright and glittering, a fantasy castle that even she, raised in her mother’s home, had found awe-inspiring. There had been something  _ alive _ about the place, and she felt that now, the thrumming heartbeat of land occupied since before the Saxons, before Merlin, before the Romans, even. Before the name had been Malfoy, this family had lived here. She pressed her hand against her throat, looking up at the manor, and wondered if it was still braced for an attack, or if it was keeping something inside.

“It’s grown over,” Dumbledore said, surveying it, and she tried not to appear too startled to see him. “An enemy of the house, and so the house protected its master.” 

“You think Lucius named You-Know-Who an enemy of his house?” she asked, though that seemed right, given the vehemence with which the manor had taken to its new wild status. Dumbledore didn’t speak, but he never really did. She could count on one hand the number of conversations she’d had with him. 

“I do,” Dumbledore said. “I believe that Voldemort encountered a very old magic he did not anticipate within the walls of Malfoy Manor that night, and that it hurt him very badly.” 

“You don’t believe he’s dead.” 

“No, but I have no proof of that,” he said, smiling at her. 

Andromeda tried to smile back, and suspected she’d failed when his eyes went soft and kind.

“What was he trying to do?” she asked, looking back at the manor. There was a howling kind of sound coming from the grounds, a rumble and a shifting like roots and branches being rubbed together--the scream of an unsettled earth. 

“He was born a half-blood, you know.” 

“He thought Lucius and Narcissa would--would just raise him as their own?” 

“No, he thought they would raise the boy for the next two decades and then hand over the body, ready for inhabitation. He does not think of people as people,” Dumbledore mused. “Draco Malfoy was a pureblooded host body; flesh of the servants willingly sacrificed to his glory.” 

“He was a fool,” she said, huffing a small, surprised laugh to find it to be true. That anyone would think that--Purebloods were  _ known _ for their unwillingness to trade that. “And if he’s not gone, then Draco is in even more danger.”

“That is my concern,” Dumbledore admitted. “Being around you and Sirius, that will protect him, and the curses laid down by Lucius and Narcissa will also protect him, but we must remain vigilant, I’m afraid.” 

Andromeda turned her eyes from his grave face to the Manor, and then exhales slowly. How, she wondered, was she going to raise him to be anything like normal?


End file.
